Snap40, a Scottish startup that has developed an AI-enabled wearable device to help health professionals monitor patients either on the hospital ward or at home, has raised $8 million in seed funding. The round is led by ADV, with participation from MMC Ventures, and brings total funding to $10 million.

Originally launched as a clinical pilot in August 2016, the Snap40 hardware and software platform initially set out to enable hospitals to monitor patients whose health is at risk of rapidly deteriorating while on ward, but has since expanded to increasingly focus on what happens after a patient is discharged, in addition to monitoring clinical trials.

Claiming to have the same accuracy as ICU monitoring, the wearable device captures oxygen saturation, respiration rate, pulse rate, temperature, movement and posture. In addition to onboard sensors, the Snap40 platform offers integrations with other devices e.g. a BP cuff, weighing scales, a glucose monitor. It then feeds this real-time data to the cloud where it is analysed by the company’s proprietary algorithms to identify if a patient’s health is at risk and alert a physician proactively.

In a call with Snap40 co-founder and CEO Christopher McCann he explained that where a patient has left hospital after an acute illness or has a long-term health condition, this can ultimately help to reduce hospital re-admission. In more extreme cases, it can also directly save lives.

Let’s take cardiac arrest, for example. McCann cites a report published by the U.K. National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) in 2012 that found physiological instability (e.g. elevation of respiration rate or a decrease in blood pressure) was present six hours prior to arrest in 62 percent of patients and twelve hours prior to arrest in 47 percent. Conversely, that instability had not been picked up on in 36 percent of cases where earlier recognition could have improved outcomes.

As another example, Sepsis, which McCann says is the number one cause of hospital readmission in the U.S., can be detected via an elevation in temperature, respiration rate or pulse rate and a drop in blood pressure or oxygen saturation. But in about 95 percent of patients in hospital, those measurements are only collected every 4 or 8 hours. And once the patient goes home, they are never collected.

“We give the physician access to both real-time and historical, trending data for the patient all on their mobile phone,” McCann says. “We wanted to create an experience where they could pull their phone out of their pocket and instantly pull up everything on a patient and allow them to see both acute changes e.g. now and long-term chronic changes over time”.

One interesting aspect of the Snap40 device is that it captures the rawest data possible (ie the actual waveforms), leaving the conversion of this data into tangible vital signs, such as respiration or pulse rate, to the company’s own software and machine learning models running in the cloud. This means that vital sign generation is easily upgradable as it is further refined and new correlations are derived from the large amount of historical data the company is amassing.

“We use non-invasive sensors to monitor the patient, transmitting the raw signal waveforms to our cloud platform, all of which we store for analysis,” says McCann. “We then use vital-sign specific machine learning models to generate each vital sign. Because we have the raw signal waveforms, this also means we can build and train new models and release new vital signs as software updates — this is quite like the Tesla model where they ship new software updates to their car that lets the car go faster”.

While Snap40’s use of machine learning/AI is currently limited to automating existing, repeatable well-defined tasks (e.g. the robust collection and generation of vital signs), moving forward the company wants to use AI to do things that aren’t humanly possible. For example, it is using historical data to build models that can predict patient deterioration based on what’s happened before across many thousands of patients.

McCann says the company is excited by the idea of being able to predict the likelihood of someone with lung disease developing an acute exacerbation of their condition. “If we can do this, with high sensitivity/specificity, then we can wrap this into a digital therapeutic, otherwise known as software as a drug… This is a whole new challenge, from a regulatory, technological and societal perspective”.

(A “digital therapeutic” is defined as software that is scientifically proven to provide some kind of positive change in someone’s health condition, either by seeking to modify the patient’s behaviour e.g. more exercise or more rest etc., or direct some other call to action, such as using a conventional device or drug in a specific way to elicit a measurable change.)

Meanwhile, Snap40 plans to use the new funding to more than double its headcount by the end of 2018, hiring in all areas of the business. The company has an office in New York and its headquarters are in Edinburgh, Scotland. Its target customer is mainly healthcare providers in the U.S., although the startup also works with NHS Trusts in England.

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I understood that. How do you work with board members? Is it a Board that has a dashboard about that company’s risk that you’re providing? Tom Turner: What we often see...

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“Augmented reality for enterprise” is the sort of phrase that surely hits all of the right neurological pleasure centers for VCs. No surprise, then, that Scandit just raised a $30 million Series B, in a round led by GV (née Google Ventures) and NGP Capital. That joins a previous $13 million raise for the Zurich-based startup.

We highlighted the company back in early 2017. At the time, its mission was focused on focused on weaning enterprises off of pricey proprietary scanning hardware — instead, its technology leveraged standard smartphones with custom software on top. AR has also always been a key part of the Scandit picture.

The company has focused on the Microsoft Hololens and other wearable displays as ways to help streamline warehouses. “A number of data capture use cases for HoloLens come to mind,” the company wrote in a 2016 blog post. “For example, a warehouse associate with a HoloLens headset could be directed with virtual markers to the correct items. They could then use the built-in HoloLens camera for hands-free scanning. HoloLens could also indicate where an item should be placed once it is scanned, or deliver additional information about scanned objects.”

This latest round will go toward growing the company globally and introducing its technology across various mobile platforms or “any camera-equipped device,” as it puts it in a press release tied to the news.

“This new funding will enable us to keep up our rapid growth, but also, looking at the bigger picture,” says CEO Samuel Mueller, “it’s going to increase the overall adoption of mobile computer vision and augmented reality in the enterprise, which will help to streamline operations and lead to cost savings.”

The pre-social media phenomenon that was early 2000s American Idol might be a weird place to spend a lot of focus when it comes to thinking about the future. But it’s also worth noting how little these types of shows adapted to build themselves into the fabric of live social commentary. Twitter has offered a nice second screen for thirsty users, but what would reality TV look like if it was built for the smartphone?

The team behind FameGame is aiming to answer these very fascinating/worrying questions with their new app which envisions the rebirth of live reality TV on your smartphone. The company’s first offering seems to be a mix of American Idol, Musical.ly and HQ Trivia with young users vying to flex their talents and social media prowess to win cash and glory.

The startup sees live gamified engagement as a social outlet that existing apps and platforms aren’t making much of a dent in. FameGame CEO Alexandra Botez grew interested in the concept after getting into live-streaming herself playing chess on Twitch and seeing the potential of bringing users closer to less gaming-focused verticals.

“We thought that the interactivity of live gaming could also be applied to make conventional TV more entertaining,” Botez tells TechCrunch. “We think Musical.ly and Instagram are pretty big so it’s hard for them to change their infrastructure in such a way that they make the type of immersive experience that we’ve created with FameGame.”

FameGame plays the game of fame by getting users to submit self-shot smartphone videos of their talents. The challenges differ by week but one contest may be focused on dance skills while another may be focused on lip-syncing. After an initial submission period, users can check out what’s been uploaded and vote for their favorites which will be included in a live show that’s hosted at 5:00 PM PT every day.

Cash prizes are at stake, but the real emphasis seems to be on social validation. Winners will also get a shoutout from a Musical.ly “celebrity” user and a big emphasis is put on the host shouting out users and their handles to drive attention their way. The whole design seems to take some pretty clear, erm, inspiration from HQ Trivia but the live voting component adds a more impactful community vibe to it though once users see they aren’t included amongst the finalists, it might be hard to hold onto viewers.

The startup’s efforts are going to start with a focus on the crowd that has helped catapult apps like Instagram and Musical.ly to rabid success. “We decided to go with young teenage girls because they are really obsessed with becoming famous on social media and they spend a lot of time on Musical.ly posting videos and not necessarily getting the gratification that they might want,” CTO Ruben Mayer-Hirshfeld tells me.

There are certainly some unique challenges with catering to such a young user base, especially from a safety standpoint. The company is going to curate the few videos that go into the live show, but there isn’t any screening happening in between user submission and user voting aside from a reporting button so the burden is ultimately put on a young user base to decide what crosses the line.

FameGame is just the start for the company’s ambitions. Botez tells me that there are a number of different TV show formats that seem ripe for the live social mobile elements, but that the main focus is getting excited teens on FameGame right now and seeing whether the format can catch steam and move beyond what’s out there already.

Y Combinator backed Zbiotics has spend two years developing what they’re billing as the world’s first genetically engineered probiotic. The startup’s initial product isn’t exactly world-changing but it might just save your day — given they’ve invented an elixir of ‘next day’ life: Aka a hangover cure.

Although you actually have to take it before — or, well, during — drinking rather than waiting until the moment of regretful misery when you wake up.

How have they done this? For their first product they’ve bioengineered probiotic bacteria to produce more of the enzyme that the body naturally uses to break down a toxic chemical byproduct of alcohol which is in turn responsible for people feeling awful after too many alcoholic drinks. So you could say they’re hoping to put probiotics on steroids. (NB: No actual steroids are involved, obviously.)

While probiotics themselves aren’t at all new, having been in the human diet for thousands of years — with wide acceptance that certain strains of these live ‘friendly’ bacteria/microorganisms can be beneficial for things like human gut health — the team’s approach of using gene editing techniques (specifically fiddling with the bacteria’s DNA) to enhance what a probiotic can deliver to the person who’s ingested it is the novel thing here.

So new they haven’t yet conducted the placebo controlled, peer-reviewed clinical trials that will ultimately be necessary to back up the efficacy claims they’re making for their biotech enhanced hangover cure.

Nor are they therefore in a position to defend their forthcoming hangover elixir from accusations of supplementary ‘snake oil’ — and, well, the supplement industry as a whole often has that charge leveled at it. And yet people keep buying and popping its pills. (Therein lies the temple rub, vitamin potion and wellness capsule. And, well, also the investor appetite for carving a fresh chunk out of a very large pie.)

Zbiotics co-founders Zack Abbott and Stephen Lamb freely admit it’s going to be a challenge to stand out — and be considered credible amid all this, er, goop noise.

“This consumer space is rife with pseudo science,” agrees Abbott, who has a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of Michigan. “Everybody is banging the drum of real science. And so we have a huge challenge to differentiate ourselves. And really convince the consumer that we’ve built something specific.

“And it really is a first effort to invent a product to specifically address their problem, as opposed to grabbing vitamins off a shelf, putting them in a bottle and labelling it.”

“There are some companies… [that] address dehydration [for hangovers]; that’s not enough. There are other companies they just put [vitamins] into a bottle, that’s not enough. There’s so much noise out there. How do we break through that? It could take some time,” admits Lamb. “And it could take a lot of work.”

Tested in vitro — and on birthday beers

At this pre-launch stage, the founders say they’ve tested their beefed up probiotic on themselves — and will go so far as to say they’ve seen “promising results”.

“I had the fortune of having the final prototype built just a week or two before my birthday and so I ended up trying it out for my birthday and it was great,” adds Abbott.

They are also keen to say they don’t want to encourage irresponsible drinking. So don’t expect their future marketing to talk about ‘a biotech license for your next bender’. Product pricing is tbc but they say they’re aiming for widely affordable, rather than lux or overly premium.

With hangover results that could speak for themselves, their hope is that people will feel confident enough to have a pop and see whether the idea of a biotech enhanced probiotic that’s pumping out extra alcohol-metabolizing enzymes stands up to several pints of lager and a few chasers (or not).

Though — when asked — they do say they also want to carry out clinical trials to glean data on the efficacy of their hangover cure.

“We are a very science-first company and so we don’t want to be making any claims about anything that we don’t have data to back up,” says Abbott.

“At this point… we’ve done significant testing in a test tube, in vitro, and shown that the bacteria we’ve built do perform the function that they’re supposed to perform. Which is to break down acetaldehyde. But we can’t make further health claims until we do clinical trials. And we in the process of drafting up a protocol for a human clinical study with one of our scientific advisors — Dr Joris Verster — a world expert in academic hangover research. But in the meantime we can’t make those claims until we have that.”

They are also planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign later this year — in order to start making some of their own noise and trying to drum up interest and, well, willing guinea pigs.

Though they are also adamant the product is entirely safe. It’s just the efficacy vs hangover misery that’s yet to be stood up in human clinical trials.

While a hangover cure might seem a trivial problem to focus high tech bioengineering effort on, they say the unmissable fact of a hangover — or indeed the lack of one — was one of the reasons why they selected such an “everyday problem” for the first application of their technique vs going for a more fuzzy (and, well forgiving on the efficacy front) generic goal like ‘wellness’. Or indeed targeting an issue where a ‘cure’ is pretty subjective and hard to quantify (like anti-aging).

Absolutely no one is going to mistake a hangover for feeling great. Though of course the power of the placebo effect working its psychological magic cannot be ruled out — not until they’ve clinically tested their stuff against it in robust trials.

On the other hand, even if it ends up that a placebo effect is what’s making people feel better, given that the target problem is (just) a hangover there aren’t likely to be too many consumer complaints and cries for money back.

“One of the reasons why we chose this use-case was that it would allow people to try it and feel the advocacy for themselves. That was very important,” says Abbott. “It’s something you can feel the results of. So that was really important. Having a visceral read-out of efficacy. People can experience the product working for themselves.”

The other reason for choosing a hangover cure was more practical: They needed a problem that could be solved with an enzyme and therefore which could be helped by genetically engineering bacteria to produce more of the sought for substance.

“The whole point here is that we’ve engineered a bacteria to express an enzyme specifically that can solve a problem,” he explains. “Enzymes are these really powerful complex molecules that are not easy to deliver to people. So it has to be a problem that you can solve with an enzyme.

“There has to be a nice fit with the technology. So we look for things where parts of the body where bacteria has access to you; you have a lot of bacteria in your gut, in your skin, in your mouth, in your nose… places were we can deliver bacteria and they can express these enzymes to solve problems of everyday health.”

“We start with probiotics that have an extremely good safety profile, have been used in regular food by humans for centuries. And we identify those because we know that they’re going to be safe, and we know that they’re going to be able to interact with your body in the way that we want them to. And then we engineer those bacteria as oppose to choosing something that your body may never have seen before,” adds Lamb, who brings prior experience helping food companies enter new markets to the startup.

He says they’ve been safety testing their prototype probiotic for the past year and change at this point — “making sure that this is ready for market before we actually launch anything”.

“We are not going to launch any kind of product until it’s completely safety tested according to every regulatory framework here in the U.S. — and we’re totally comfortable with that,” he adds emphatically.

They do also intend to move beyond hangover cures, with the plan being to develop additional probiotics that target other use-cases. And say they’ve been building a gene editing platform that’s flexible for that purpose. Though they’re not disclosing exactly what else they’re working on or eyeing up — wanting to keep that powder dry for now.

“I spent over a year building the first product, and the lion’s share of that time was spent making sort of a genetic platform… that was adaptable to multiple use-cases,” says Abbott. “At first I just engineered the bacteria to be able to make a lot of enzyme generally. Whatever enzyme I put into the platform. And so the first enzyme I put in was to break down acetaldehydes. That being said it could be easily switched out for an enzyme to break down… a different toxin that your body has to deal with. So the platform is very adaptable and it was designed to be that way.”

“That being said there are certain use-cases we’re really excited about that may require additional optimization techniques in order to make them work specifically for that use-case. So, generally speaking, some may require more work than others but the platform we started with gives us a good launch pad,” he adds.

As well as YC’s standard startup deal, the team has raised an additional $2.8M in seed funding this year for R&D and the initial product roadmap. They’re hoping the forthcoming crowdfunding campaign will give them the additional lift to ship the consumer product into the US market.

Investors in the seed round aren’t being disclosed at this stage. Abbott also notes that he previously got a small amount of pre-seed funding, early on, to fund building the prototype.

It’s fair to say that biotech as an investment space isn’t a bet for every investor — given product development risks, timeframes and perhaps also some of the deflated hype of past years. Which perhaps explains why Zbiotics investors aren’t ready to shout all about it just yet. Even if they’re feeling great about not having a hangover.

“We’ve found different levels of success with different investors,” agrees Lamb. “Where we’ve found the most success is in investors who see the vision for the technology and understand it as something that is and can be truly innovative relative to what’s on the market today. So probiotics themselves — traditional probiotics —  are a $40BN industry, and the fact is that most of those probiotics don’t do anything or are inconsistent at best. So we found investors who have a mindset where they can see how a novel probiotic, something that actually is engineered to work and is based in a high level of biotech is something that can really disrupt that area. And that may or may not be traditional biotech investors. Oftentimes it’s investors who are really looking to push the envelope.

“We definitely had to find the right investor and the traditional biotech investor often is looking for different things than we had to offer,” adds Abbott. “And different pathways — more traditional pathways. We’re going not conventionally I think with bringing this hard biotech to market quickly. So it definitely is threading the needle and finding the right investors.”

Nirav Tolia, CEO of Nextdoor, is stepping down from his role, Recode reports. For those unfamiliar with the company, Nextdoor is like a social network for your neighborhood. Though, over the years, there has been controversy around Nextdoor’s role in promoting racial profiling. Nextdoor later rolled out a new tool to address some of the issues around racial profiling.

In an email sent to the team today, Tolia said he’s starting to look for his replacement and once that happens, he will move into an active chairman role on the board, according to Recode.

Here’s a nugget from the email, obtained by Recode:

Yet as Nextdoor evolves, the role of the CEO needs to evolve as well. The size of our footprint is growing larger and our organization is growing more complex. The time is right to find the next CEO for Nextdoor. With our board of directors, I will be leading the search to recruit a proven operator who can take our company to the next level. We will take our time to find the right person, so this process will likely take several months. During that period, I will continue to lead as CEO. When the next CEO is selected, I will become Chair of the Board where I will continue doing whatever I can to help us succeed.

Nextdoor raised $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation last December, followed by an expansion into France in January.

Update: The company has since posted on its blog the full email:

Just over eight years ago, I was blessed to be part of a group of seven friends who conceived of the idea behind Nextdoor. We were a tight-knit, ambitious group of co-founders who believed deeply in the power of community and dedicated ourselves to helping neighbors everywhere create stronger, safer, happier places to call home.

It is amazing to see how this simple but powerful mission has inspired the company that Nextdoor is today. That first year, we worked tirelessly to convince 176 neighborhoods to adopt our platform. Since then, we have grown more than 1000X – we now serve over 200,000 neighborhoods across five countries – including nearly 90% of all neighborhoods in the U.S.

All of this has been made possible by the passion and hard work of each of our employees. Their dedication and commitment energizes me every single day. I’ve never been more excited about our team, including our recent additions of Chief Financial Officer and Chief Legal Counsel. It has been the honor of a lifetime to lead this company as CEO.

Yet as Nextdoor evolves, the role of the CEO needs to evolve as well. The size of our footprint is growing larger and our organization is growing more complex. The time is right to find the next CEO for Nextdoor. With our board of directors, I will be leading the search to recruit a proven operator who can take our company to the next level. We will take our time to find the right person, so this process will likely take several months. During that period, I will continue to lead as CEO. When the next CEO is selected, I will become Chair of the Board where I will continue doing whatever I can to help us succeed.

The future is exceptionally bright for Nextdoor. We’ve never been more well-positioned to achieve our potential, both as a business and force for good in the world. Thank you for the last eight years, this has been one of the best experiences of my life. I will always be inspired by the amazing opportunity – and worthy mission – that makes our company truly special.

With gratitude,

Nirav

Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to market strategy for this company? Greg Borchardt: There are two sides of the business. They started off in the medical device space. They created a consumer product...

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Outvote, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, wants to make grassroots-style campaigning easier and more personal, with the launch of an app that allows people to text their friends with reminders to vote. The idea is to take advantage of people’s willingness to use social sharing to communicate about political issues, while also leveraging the simplicity that comes with tweeting or posting to Facebook and turning that into an actionable reminder that can actually drive people to the polls during critical times.

The startup was founded by Naseem Makiya, a Harvard-educated software engineer with a background in startups, including San Francisco-based Moovweb and Cambridge area’s DataCamp; along with Nadeem Mazen, an MIT grad and interactive designer who once worked with OK GO on one of its viral music videos, and who now owns the Cambridge-based creative agency Nimblebot.

Mazen, who has since moved into an advisory role with Outvote, also has more direct political experience, having run for public office himself. In fact, he learned first-hand how every vote counts, having won his Cambridge City Council position in 2013 by just six votes.

He also attributed his second election win to organizing low propensity, minority and younger voters — plus “really doing a lot of texting and a lot of outreach through my friend networks,” says Mazen.

When Mazen’s time in politics ended, he then helped others get elected using similar means. Later, he and Makiya brought together a group of Harvard and MIT folks to formalize a company around the technology they were using. This became Outvote.

While today there are a lot of tools for voter outreach, many of those operated by well-known organizations, like MoveOn, for example, involve people opting in to receive texts from the group in question. Outvote is different because it’s a tool that helps individual voters reach out to their own personal acquaintances, family and friends.

“The way campaigns are run right now is most of the budget is spent on ads that are really low ROI — they have some effect on persuasion, but less effect on actual voter turnout,” explains Makiya. “With this effort, we’re trying to bring politics back to more of word-of-mouth and conversations between friends,” he says.

The team began working on the technology for Outvote last summer, and officially founded the company early this year.

While individuals are the app’s end users, they’re brought into the app by a campaign.

Users give the app permission to upload their phone’s contacts, which Outvote matches up with registered voter databases. That way, you’ll only be texting those who can actually go vote in your district. When the matching completes, the app has scripts that allow users to just click to text your friends a message from your own phone number.

In other words, it’s no longer a political campaign or organization bugging people to go vote via text — it’s a friend. If your friends have a problem with the unsolicited text, they’ll have to tell you.

The app also uses some sort of basic modeling to figure out who best to text, based on things like past voter history, whether that person tends to vote in the primaries, if they’re a registered Democrat and so on.

Oh, yes, that’s right — this app is built for Democratic campaigns only.

Outvote makes no apologies about the fact that it is a tool designed to help Democrats win back seats across the U.S., both on local and national levels.

“We think it’s really critical that Democrats begin to invest in and promote technology. The right is doing a much better job of investing in some of the niche technology,” says Mazen. “And, obviously, groups like Cambridge Analytica and folks have been, I would say, underhanded, in their use of technology,” he adds. “We have to work twice as hard to be twice as resolute, as a result.”

The company says it has turned down right-leaning independents and Republican campaigns that wanted to use its technology, and is instead piloting with around 50 Democratic campaigns at present. Campaigns will be charged a low monthly fee for using Outvote that will vary depending on their size. However, many of the pilot customers are using Outvote for free at this time.

The goal is to make Outvote far more affordable than the existing mass-texting services that charge as much as 30 cents per person per month, which can cost campaigns hundreds of thousands of dollars at scale. Outvote aims to be around 2 to 5 cents per text, it says.

For now, its focus is on raising awareness about the candidate and their issues, and getting people to the polls. It’s not offering the sort of “call your congressman”-style outreach efforts you’ll find in some other political apps.

Outvote is also partnered with The Movement Cooperative, Represent.Us, Flippable, the DNC, Vote.org and Swing Left, according to its website.

The startup is already reporting some early successes. When used last November, it found millennials contacted through Outvote were twice as likely to vote, while non-millennials were 50 percent more likely to vote. The company doesn’t have the data yet from how it’s been doing in the primaries, but says it’s been getting good feedback from the participating campaigns.

In addition to the Y Combinator backing, Outvote has raised $300,000 in seed funding from 2enable Partners ahead of Demo Day.

Outvote’s app is available on both iOS and Android.

It’s still quite hard to buy physical goods using bitcoins or ethers. Coinbase plans to (partially) solve that issue with a new partnership with WeGift. Coinbase customers in Europe and Australia can now convert their tokens on their Coinbase account into digital gift cards for popular stores.

For instance, you’ll be able to buy gift cards for Uber, Tesco, Google Play, Marks and Spencer and more. The feature is now live in the U.K., Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands and Australia.

While WeGift promises gift cards for dozens of merchants, most of them are restricted to customers based in the U.K. If you live in another country, you’ll only get a handful of options. For instance, in France you can only buy gift cards for Décathlon, Bloom & Wild, Global Hotel Card and Ticketmaster. Coinbase says that it will adding be more retailers in the coming months.

In some cases, WeGift offers you the fiat equivalent of your cryptocurrencies as well as a tiny bonus. For instance, you get £102 in Uber gift cards if you spend the equivalent of £100 in bitcoins.

In the U.S., Coinbase also partnered with Shift for a traditional Visa card. But many European cryptocurrency companies who provided Visa cards had to go back to the drawing board because Visa stopped working Wave Crest Holding — Wave Crest Holding was the card issuer for all European cryptocurrency cards.

Gift cards aren’t as convenient as receiving money on your bank account or a debit card. But they’re a great way to avoid telling your bank that you made money by speculating on cryptocurrencies. Many banks directly report data on their users to local tax authorities. But don’t forget that Coinbase can track all your withdrawal events and notify tax authorities too.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

Quantum computing may be a long ways off, but early applications of it aren’t as far off as you might think, according to longtime researcher and ColdQuanta founder Dana Anderson.

The startup creates a device that’s designed to make it easier to start operating quantum computing-like operations on near-term problems like signal processing or time measurement, which is the kind of low-hanging fruit that current technology might enable. Researchers using that approach — a set of atoms where there’s practically no motion — require some mechanism of keeping them from moving, for which some cases involve refrigeration. ColdQuanta’s main product is a set of lasers that’s able to stabilize a set of atoms and allow them to operate with those properties. It’s certainly nowhere close to a server — or even a standard computer — but using this kind of a tool, it might be easier to handle tasks like real-time signal processing. ColdQuanta said today that it has raised $6.75 million in a round led by Maverick Ventures and including Global Frontier Investments.

“If you were to look out the window, and you turned off GPS because it’s a conflict or sunspots, you can ask, ‘can I fly to New York from San Francisco with my eyes closed,'” Anderson said. “The answer is no. These types of applications — real-world applications based on fundamental advances of physics — keeps me thinking, and up at night. Clocks sound pretty boring, and you might ask why do I need something like that. But there’s enormous demand for improvements in time-keeping, whether for high-frequency trading, navigation, guidance, or autonomous vehicles. We see those as early applications.”

The primary aim of ColdQuanta’s hardware is, Andersen says, to create a “neutral” set of atoms that all have identical properties of the ones next to them. It does that by using a set of lasers to bring them to a near standstill — within a millionth of a degree of absolute zero — and then control their properties using lasers. That way, a researcher or team could scale that up to a larger system where they can start finding applications right away. That includes time-keeping, secure communications and others, now that a lot of the primary limitations of the technology have gotten a little more relaxed over time. ColdQuanta’s aim is to be able to do this in a normal, room-temperature situation throughout the environment everywhere else, as well. The lasers are tuned in such a way that a stream of photons hitting each atom slows it down until it’s largely stable (also being held up by another set of lasers to account for gravity).

“Laser technology was unreliable in the early days, that was mostly a time when things weren’t working, and most often it was the laser,” Anderson said. “What ColdQuanta is focused on, now for 11 years, is technology that could be manufactured in large quantities, making reliable, small, and robust equipment. If you looked at the initial quantum gas machine it took a couple of square meters of area on a table plus tons of electrics. Now we’ve made it small enough that there’s one sitting on the ISS. It’s a fairly small package, mostly because integration techniques, improvements in lasers and developing key electronics components have helped us achieve this task.”

There may be an analogy between what’s happened with the emergence of the widespread use of deep learning for a variety of tasks and the early stages of products like ColdQuanta. Deep learning, Andersen said, was the key innovation on the change in a lot of machine learning models, but there were plenty of smaller use cases where it was interesting and useful — even back in the 1990s. Andersen said there will probably be a similar situation going forward as limited quantum computing will find some near-term applications and then exist on a similar timetable as other technological shifts as it waits for the biggest, cheapest, and most powerful use case that demands widespread adoption.

“I see the path we’re going on is very familiar,” Andersen said. “I don’t think the technological challenges we face are improbable. We’ve been through other difficult technology roadmaps before and overcome them. The landscape is very familiar. The timescale of inserting them into real-world problems gets kind of fuzzy when you have to predict so far off, but I think quantum computers will get there. I’m quite convinced there will be modest applications of quantum computers that will show up very soon. Quantum simulation, I have almost no doubt, will find pure science uses and begin to apply to at least in restricted spaces relative to national security and defense.”

In a letter to backers today, Bay Area-based Mayfield Robotics said it was “crushed” to announce that it has ceased manufacturing of its home robot, Kuri. The note finds the Bosch-backed business grappling with an uncertain future, as it pauses all operations and re-evaluates its future.

Launched in 2015, as part of Bosch’s Startup Platform, the company debuted its home robot at CES the following year. It took close to two years, but the company finally began shipping the adorable little robot to backers in late 2017. Kuri also appeared on stage at our robotics event, back in May.

According to the letter, however, Bosch struggled to find good fit for the company in its broader portfolio.

“From the beginning, we have been constantly looking for the best paths to achieve scale and continue to advance our innovative technology,” the company writes. “Typically, startups in the Bosch Startup Platform are integrated into existing Bosch business units, but after extensive review, there was not a business fit within Bosch to support and scale our business.”

Home robotics have, of course, had a famously difficult time finding mainstream success, through a combination of prohibitive pricing (Kuri carried a $700 price tag) and limited functionality. Only the hyper-focused Roomba has managed to effectively buck that trend.

Existing within the larger confines of Bosch likely sheltered the company from some of those harsher realities, but ultimately, corporations have little time for products that don’t play into their larger strategies. Without a support structure, the future remains one giant question mark for the company.

“Creating a robot like Kuri is a massive undertaking,” Mayfield writes. “We don’t know what the coming months will bring. Regardless, we stand firm in our belief that the home robot Renaissance is just beginning, and it’s going to be amazing.”

Riding on a wave of an explosion in the use of machine learning to power, well, just about everything is the emergence of GPUs as one of the go-to methods to handle all the processing for those operations.

But getting access to those GPUs — whether using the cards themselves or possibly through something like AWS — might still be too difficult or too expensive for some companies or research teams. So Davit Buniatyan and his co-founders decided to start Snark AI, which helps companies rent GPUs that aren’t in use across a distributed network of companies that just have them sitting there, rather than through a service like Amazon. While the larger cloud providers offer similar access to GPUs, Buniatyan’s hope is that it’ll be attractive enough to companies and developers to tap a different network if they can lower that barrier to entry. The company is launching out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2018 class.

“We bet on that there will always be a gap between mining and AWS or Google Cloud prices,” Buniatyan said. “If the mining will be [more profitable than the cost of running a GPU], anyone can get into AWS and do mining and be profitable. We’re building a distributed cloud computing platform for clients that can easily access the resources there but are not used.”

The startup works with companies with a lot of spare GPUs that aren’t in use, such as gaming cloud companies or crypto mining companies. Teams that need GPUs for training their machine learning models get access to the raw hardware, while teams that just need those GPUs to handle inference get access to them through a set of APIs. There’s a distinction between the two because they are two sides to machine learning — the former building the model that the latter uses to execute some task, like image or speech recognition. When the GPUs are idle, they run mining to pay the hardware providers, and Snark AI also offers the capability to both mine and run deep learning inference on a piece of hardware simultaneously, Buniatyan said.

Snark AI matches the proper amount of GPU power to whatever a team needs, and then deploys it across a network of distributed idle cards that companies have in various data centers. It’s one way to potentially reduce the cost of that GPU over time, which may be a substantial investment initially but get a return over time while it isn’t in use. If that’s the case, it may also encourage more companies to sign up with a network like this — Snark AI or otherwise — and deploy similar cards.

There’s also an emerging trend of specialized chips that focus on machine learning or inference, which look to reduce the cost, power consumption or space requirements of machine learning tasks. That ecosystem of startups, like Cerebras Systems, Mythic, Graphcore or any of the other well-funded startups, all potentially have a shot at unseating GPUs for machine learning tasks. There’s also the emergence of ASICs, customized chips that are better suited to tasks like crypto mining, which could fracture an ecosystem like this — especially if the larger cloud providers decide to build or deploy something similar (such as Google’s TPU). But this also means that there’s room to potentially create some new interface layer that can snap up all the leftovers for tasks that companies might need, but don’t necessarily need bleeding-edge technology like that from those startups.

There’s always going to be the same argument that was made for Dropbox prior to its significant focus on enterprises and collaboration: the price falls dramatically as it becomes more commoditized. That might be especially true for companies like Amazon and Google, which have already run that playbook, and could leverage their dominance in cloud computing to put a significant amount of pressure on a third-party network like Snark AI. Google also has the ability to build proprietary hardware like the TPU for specialized operations. But Buniatyan said the company’s focus on being able to juggle inference and mining, in addition to keeping that cost low for idle GPUs of companies that are just looking to deploy, should keep it viable, even amid a changing ecosystem that’s focusing on machine learning.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some of your portfolio highlights. What are you really proud of having invested in? As you choose the ones to talk about, specifically point out when you saw them, in...

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Equidate, a 4.5-year-old, San Francisco-based marketplace that makes privately held shares available to accredited investors wanting to buy them, is announcing a whopper of a round this morning: $50 million in Series B funding from Financial Technology Partners, Panorama Point Partners and Operative Capital. The company had earlier raised only very small seed and Series A rounds from renowned investors Scott Banister, Tim Draper and Peter Thiel.

The round is entirely unsurprising, given the circle of life for many venture-backed startups, which is to raise capital, raise more capital if your company takes off, then . . . raise even more capital — sometimes a staggering amount — while pushing off an IPO or sale for as long as possible. (At this point, you need to ensure that when you do make a move, your company is valuable enough to return all that money and then some.)

The cycle won’t change any time soon, given the amounts of late-stage capital being raised to support it. Sequoia Capital is well on its way to closing an $8 billion fund. Insight Venture Partners last week closed a $6.3 billion fund. Lightspeed Venture Partners announced $1.8 billion across two new funds earlier this month. Index Ventures closed on two funds totaling $1.65 billion earlier this month. It goes on and on.

While an interesting and complicated and controversial trend for many reasons, including that many more “unicorns” are being minted than will be giant success stories, the shift toward pushing out potential liquidity events has been a very propitious development for secondary players — outfits like Industry Ventures and EquityZen and Saints Capital — that help employees and early investors in privately held companies sell their “pre-IPO” holdings to someone else.

It’s been good news, too, for Equidate, whose profile has been rising behind the scenes, including in part to its role in working with the streaming music service Spotify ahead of its direct public listing in April. According to Equidate co-founder and co-CEO Sohail Prasad, by encouraging an active secondary market ahead of that move, Spotify was able to glean the volume and price discovery information it needed to set a fair price for its public market shares, and Equidate handled 40 percent of those trades.

Equidate, which employs 26 people, typically requires a minimum investment of between $20,000 and $50,000. It serves accredited and institutional investors only. With exceptions, it keeps 5 percent of each transaction as its commission fee, and it says that it’s on track to transact $1 billion worth of shares this year.

Other past companies that Equidate has either worked with directly — or, at least, that haven’t stopped Equidate from selling their privately held shares — include Didi, the major Chinese ridesharing company; Meituan Dianping, the highly valued, China-based group-buying website for locally found consumer products and services (it filed to go public last month); Tencent’s music service, which also plans to list soon; and Xiaomi, the smartphone maker that went public in Hong Kong earlier this month.

Indeed, asked about trends he is seeing in the secondary market, Prasad notes companies are staying private longer, prompting more of them to think about “interval liquidity programs” that let employees and early shareholders sell during pre-set windows.

He also notes that unlike in recent years, where money around the world was looking for opportunities in Silicon Valley, a bit of a sea change is currently afoot. Today, he says, “we’re seeing more VCs and hedge funds looking at these new Asian unicorns and Chinese unicorns in particular. They see them as a great opportunity.”

Pictured above, left to right, Equidate co-founders and co-CEOs Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam.

Half a decade after its founding, Peloton became a unicorn. During its short existence, the company has found tremendous success riding the wave of successful spin classes that includes the likes of SoulCycle and Flywheel.

Peloton offered a unique take on the space, harnessing technology to provide a state of the art version of the phenomenon from the comfort (and privacy) of the user’s home. Peloton’s pricey bikes live-stream spin classes, through a subscription based service.

Since its founding, Peloton has managed to double the size of its company, year over year, while raising $444.7 million, at last count. In a recent interview, CEO and co-founder John Foley called the company, “weirdly profitable.” 

The company released its first bike in 2014. Last year, it added a treadmill to its list of livestream devices, along with a more rugged version of its bike targeted at gyms and hotels.  Peloton has continued to expand its reach with the additions of showrooms, designed at bringing the experience closer to users who might otherwise not have an opportunity to interact with the company’s $2,000 devices.

Foley will join us Disrupt in San Francisco this September to discuss how the company has managed to grow so quickly, while avoiding the pitfalls of putting too much stock into the latest fitness trends.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available at the Early-Bird rate until Aug 1 here.

Christie Lagally spent half of a decade working on planes as an aerospace engineer — but now she’s trying to attack the food industry head-on with a hopeful attempt to change the way we eat chicken.

That’s the aim of Seattle Food Tech, which looks to create what effectively looks and feels like a chicken nugget out of plant-based food. That means trying to mimic it all the way down to the puff it gets in an oven, and while some companies like Impossible Foods go after the look and feel of a burger, Lagally wants to focus on the much lower-hanging fruit of more processed food — which makes up a significant chunk of chicken consumption. The company is coming out of Y Combinator’s 2018 summer class this year.

“We’ve continued to develop all sorts of systems to support [meat as a staple of the diet], with funding for farmers to support the meat industry, for food groups that push dairy and meat, and to support all that we developed the concept of factory farming,” Lagally said. “Chicken is very efficient, but I saw a lot of the direct impact of abuse of animals. In Washington State I saw chickens go up and down the highway every morning to my trip to Boeing. As someone who cared about animals, I felt that I needed to do something. We’ve never really been able to control the meat industry in terms of pollution runoff, and we’re barely making inroads on health claims.”

The first product is a processed chicken nugget equivalent which Seattle Food Tech tries to sell to larger food services companies (think something like Aramark). That’s the market that’s most useful given that a significant portion of the chicken consumed by the population comes through food services. There are other advantages to creating a breaded chicken nugget equivalent, such as not having to worry so much about the color change in the same way that raw chicken does when it’s cooked. But the plant-based nugget still has to plump up, get juicy, and feel like a normal piece of processed chicken would feel like if it’s going to compete.

The company also, to that end, has to target municipalities if it’s going to actually get the kinds of operations rolling to start producing those plant-based substitutes. That’s an argument that happens at the level of a local community, and Lagally says that the production facility itself is as much the product as the actual end-nugget that might end up in the hands of someone picking up lunch from an office cafeteria. The nugget is a wheat-based product which is designed to perform like a Tyson chicken nugget.

“We can go to a municipality and say, we have a processing facility that won’t require you to raise taxes, we can offer similar or more jobs [than competitors], we can put out 1.3 million pounds of meat per month, which is huge,” she said. “We’ll be a really good economic booster of the area and be able to use plant-based proteins from local farmers. Our waste is almost nothing other than normal waste water from a facility, and we end up being a much more attractive addition to a small town in Nebraska or New Jersey.”

It’s certainly going to be an interesting space, especially given that a key ingredient for Impossible Foods got the OK from the FDA, which could make it more attractive as a burger patty substitute. So, there will be an interesting race to see which foods companies will end up taking over a key part of the consumption. Companies like Seattle Food Tech will also inevitably run into pushback from the same industries that they are trying to capture market share. But Lagally said that there should be plenty of room for a company like Seattle Food Tech to maneuver its way to success.

“The truth of the matter is most of these issues are decided at the state and local level,” Lagally said. “You can put a lot of money into lobbying in D.C., and money is influence at every level at the government. But when those come down to community choices, those are made at the council level. Farmers understand that they have to be a part of their community. A wheat farmer who processes our wheat into a wheat protein can sell to me for money money than selling it at a really low commodity cost.”

Grubhub announced this morning that it’s agreed to acquire LevelUp for $390 million cash.

Founder and CEO Matt Maloney told me that while previous Grubhub acquisitions like Eat24 were designed to give the company’s delivery business more scale, “This is kind of a different acquisition. It’s a product and strategic positioning acquisition.”

LevelUp is based in Boston, offering a platform to manage digital ordering, payments and loyalty, with customers like KFC, Taco Bell Pret a Manger, Potbelly and Bareburger. Maloney said that buying the company allows Grubhub to deepen its integration with restaurants’ point-of-sale systems. That, in turn, will allow them to handle more deliveries.

At the same time, Maloney said LevelUp can help Grubhub build a restaurant platform that goes beyond delivery, for example by managing their customer interactions across mobile and the web.

“We want to help restaurants actively engage with their diners,” Maloney said. “This is a huge step in that direction.”

Once the regulatory waiting period is over, the entire LevelUp team will be joining Grubhub, with founder and CEO Seth Priebatsch reporting to Maloney — who said that in the short term, he plans to change very little, aside from the POS integrations. Even in the long term, he suggested that LevelUp could continue to operate as its own brand within the larger Grubhub platform.

“They’re doing something really well and we don’t want to screw that up,” he said. “We want to make as little change as possible, until we all understand how we’re better working together.”

The LevelUp platform was launched in 2011, and the company has raised around $108 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Highland Capital, GV, Balderton Capital, Deutsche Telecom Strategic Investments, Continental Advisors, Transmedia Capital and U.S. Boston Capital.

“For the last seven years, we have worked to provide restaurant clients with a complete solution to engage customers, and this agreement is the biggest and most exciting step in achieving that mission,” Priebatsch said in a statement provided by Grubhub. “After close, the entire team will remain in Boston and our office will become Grubhub’s newest center of technology excellence.”

The announcement came as part of Grubhub’s second quarter earnings release, which saw the company grow active diners by 70 percent year-over-year, to 15.6 million, while revenue increased 51 percent, to $240 million.

ClassPass today announced the close of an $85 million Series D financing round led by Temasek, the same firm that led the startup’s Series C financing. L Catterton, a private equity firm that has also invested in the likes of Peloton, Equinox, and Pure Barre, also participated in the round.

As part of the deal, L Catterton’s Michael Farello will join the ClassPass board.

It’s also worth noting that CEO Fritz Lanman confirmed that the share price dropped as part of the $70 million Series C round, but that the valuation didn’t. Both share price and valuation went up during this latest round. That said, Lanman stayed mum on any actual numbers around valuation.

This latest round brings ClassPass’s total funding to $255 million.

ClassPass first launched in 2012 out of TechStars. Back then, it was called Classtivity, and it operated under a very different business model. Users could search for a la carte classes from dance and fitness studios, book an appointment and complete the transaction all from their website.

Turns out, gym memberships exist for a reason. Without a monthly up front investment, most people don’t have the motivation to go workout.

After a number of iterations, ClassPass rebranded and switched up the business model to become the subscription studio fitness plan we have come to know today.

But that didn’t mean the startup was done adapting.

In 2016, ClassPass ditched its unlimited tier and raised prices to produce healthier margins. Before this, some casual ClassPass users were subsidizing the unlimited users who were going to classes four or five times a week. Though it caused a bit of an uproar, and ultimately lost ClassPass around 10 percent of its userbase, the move gave the company much stronger unit economics to allow for further expansion.

Another switch came in the fall of 2017 when ClassPass moved to a credit-based payment system, allowing the company to offer variable pricing to its studio partners to account for peak times and high-quality classes.

It took a hell of a lot of tweaking, but ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman believes that the company is finally in a place where it can worry first, second, and last about expansion.

“[Founder and Chairman Payal Kadakia] and I are most excited about this round because it validates what we did months ago,” said Lanman. “We went through a huge business model evolution and a number of iterations, but this round was led by the same firm who led our Series C and includes one of the most prominent private equity firms in the studio fitness and consumer space.”

In May, ClassPass announced its intention to launch in nine international cities by the end of this year, with a focus on Southeast Asia. The company already has a strong foothold in the U.S., with operations in Canada, Australia, and a strong and growing market in the UK.

“It feels like we can take over the world,” said founder and Chairman of the board Payal Kadakia. “We’ve seen people compete and replicate our model, but we own our category, and we have the ammunition and the right model to tackle the world. Now, our focus is to make sure ClassPass works everywhere. Once we get the behavior working for customers in other markets, we earn the right to offer new categories.

The first category on the list? Wellness. But first, the company is focused on owning every market where studio fitness is already present.

As far as the funding is concerned, it will be used to continue adding to the team — ClassPass currently has 335 employees, and plans to add over 100 in the coming months — as well as fuel international expansion. The funding will also be used, in part, to start marketing ClassPass Live, a live at-home video workout akin to Peloton’s product. ClassPass Live was first launched in March, but the company has spent the time since then working out the bugs and making small iterations to ensure the service is ready for primetime.

Last quarter, Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG) was hit by a $5.1 billion fine by the European Commission. But despite the hit, the company surpassed all market expectations and saw its stock soar to record...

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